I’m a bit like this, except it’s a single injury: a scar in my arm. Caused by mixing calcium carbide and water in a glass bottle and then closing it. (I was a dumb kid. And yes, kid — I was 14 back then.)

I’m proud of it not because of the scar itself, or because “I survived! I must be strong!”, but because it was motivated by my curiosity about the world. It was part of my quest to know a wee bit more, you know?

I have this book. It’s by no means a bad book; it’s a great starting point, the info there seems to be well researched, and the main focus seems to be on the language diversity attested around the world. But yes, if you’re looking for depth it feels like missing stuff. (It doesn’t even mention the Macro-Ge and Tupi families ;_; )

A lot of the text is good advice for any project, not just programming. Whatever you’re working on, if it’s meaningful, should have a simple and definite scope, and clear priorities. Even it’s something like oil painting, pepper breeding, or a cardboard war tank for your cat.

A few additional tidbits. Not contradicting the text itself, but things people often get wrong about this sort of advice.

Constraints are advantages

Only to the point they force you to prioritise. You can’t really give someone raw dough and say “we were making bread under a time constrain”.

Ignore feature requests — don’t build what users ask for; understand the underlying problem instead

This does NOT mean “be an assumptive piece of shit”. You do not know what the user “wants” or “needs”, nor you should lie you do. It means instead you should look at what your project does versus what it should be doing, see if they mismatch, and address that mismatch.

Ship early, ship often — a half-product that’s real beats a perfect product that’s vaporware

This does not mean “user time is worthless trash, might as well use those things as unpaid beta testers”. Or “it’s fine to release broken shit”. It means instead “be reasonable with your expectations of perfection, and take diminishing returns into account”.

Sensible advice (don’t use this sort of grey), bullshit reason and facepalm-worthy analogy:

I actually believe increasing contrast for everyone improves the information density of our content. It literally becomes higher fidelity. It’s like taking a WAV file, converting to a 1kbps MP3, and then re-converting to a WAV file. You just footgunned yourself my dude! You should not do that.

No.

For text the information is encoded in the characters, that are abstract units. A “t” written in black conveys the exact same information as a “t” written in grey on white. What matters is if you’re using a “t” instead of a “d” or a “τ” or whatever. As such, information density won’t be affected by your questionable colour choices. Nor fidelity, because the information itself isn’t changing.

For audio things are different. Audio doesn’t work through those abstract units, you care about the sound wave; and that sound wave will get distorted once you convert the WAV into the 1kbps MP3.

The real reason to not use this sort of grey is that it’ll always give you a low contrast, no matter what you pair it with. And both excessively high and excessively low contrasts are harder to read and will tire the readers’ eyes down, doubly so for the ones with poor eyesight.

If it was just BullshitIn and Brainrot News I’d laugh my arse off. The problem is the rest of the internet.

And it gets worse than what the article says. It isn’t just the information present in the text; it’s also how you use language. Spelling, word choice, punctuation, average sentence size, even discourse structure, those are all things that can be used to associate 2+ accounts as coming from the same person, they’re like a linguistic fingerprint. And neural networks are rather good at finding this sort of pattern.

Fuck, you don’t even need a NN to do that. It’s possible to do it by hand, just incredibly boring and laborious.

Got it — then they have agency, much like anyone else. So they should be able to consent, and to get that consent violated by the spell.

Thanks for the info!

Are the atronachs from atronachy and atromancy identical?

If yes, I think consent applies to both. It would be like humans reproducing; a child still has their own agency, even if they were “created” by the parents.

If not… it depends, really. Hypothetically speaking, if you create one through atronachy, and release [it? them?] free, would [it? they?] be able to take autonomous decisions?

I don’t play Elder Scrolls so I had to dig this up.

Flame atronachs are apparently elemental daedra (divine beings who are not ancestors of human beings, unlike the aedra), summoned through Atromancy. Apparently they are able to make their own decisions, so they have agency, so consent applies to them.

But I couldn’t find how much the conjuration process removes their agency; if they’re forced to obey the conjurer’s orders to the letter, if they can creatively interpret those orders, or if it’s a single order.

Shamelessly plugging !linguistics@mander.xyz here. This topic fits well in that community.

Also, I apologise for the wall of text, it’s just this topic interests me by a lot.

Proto-Indo-European is a reconstruction of the common ancestor (actually two; more on that later) of multiple languages spoken in India and in Europe, that are clearly related to each other.

We know there are a lot of gaps in our knowledge about it, that people have been trying to fill since the 19th century, but ideally this reconstruction should be as close as possible to the real deal that we can reasonably get. For example:

• We don’t really know the true phonetic nature of the three series of occlusives of the language. But we know they were three; certainly not just two, and likely not as many as four.
• We don’t know all suffixes of the language. But we do know the language had ~eight noun cases, those cases were marked by suffixes (unlike position, as in English… or particles, as in Japanese), and worked in a similar way as they do in Sanskrit, Latin, and Ancient Greek.
• We might not have a fully solved family tree for the PIE descendants, but we have a pretty good guess on who’s a descendant (like Spanish, Italian, Hindi, German, Swedish) and who’s not (like Basque, Etruscan, Tamil, Hungarian, Finnish).

About the method:

The method used is called the comparative method. It boils down to looking for regular sound correspondences in the child languages and, based on sound changes we attested, coming up with hypotheses that would explain those sound correspondences.

It is not just assumptions; an assumption pops up when you treat the uncertain as certain. When using the comparative method you’re expected to come up with multiple competing hypotheses, keeping in mind they might be wrong, and look for info that helps you to ditch one or another.

And as messy it is, it has predictive power. A good example of that are the laryngeals, annotated *h₁ *h₂ *h₃. When Saussure (a linguist) proposed PIE had those sounds, nobody had direct evidence they existed; it was only indirect, based on sound correspondences found in the descendant languages (mostly the nearby vowels). Those laryngeals were shown to have actually existed once Hittite was discovered, because it actually preserved sounds in their place.

Another example comes from Proto-Romance. Proto-Romance is what you get when you apply the comparative method to the modern Romance languages, as opposed to their real ancestor, Latin. So by comparing the theoretical Proto-Romance with the real deal Latin, we can gauge how well the method works. And well, Proto-Romance is surprisingly close to what’s attested for Late Imperial Latin, specially the one used by poor people. (I can go further on that if you want).

About conlangs vs. reconstruction: PIE is not a constructed language. It’s a reconstructed one.

The key difference is that, when you’re building a conlang, you’re free to decide everything about it. This freedom does not exist for Proto-Indo-European or other reconstructions, you need to do it based on the data at hand.

You can of course create a conlang using that reconstruction as a basis; plenty people do*. And if you ever see “PIE being spoken” out there, it’s probably something like this. But note that you’ll need to add stuff not found in the reconstruction, if you want it to be actually usable, already crossing the line between science and art.

*just in this case, please PLEASE make sure to fix that unholy notation. I have an alternative one if you want, it makes the language look a bit more reasonable.

On being two languages:

When people started noticing the obvious similarities between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek, in the 19th century, the idea they had a common ancestor came up naturally. And then, when Hittite was discovered, it was obvious that common ancestor of Sanskrit/Latin/Greek was also the ancestor of Hittite.

But that doesn’t tell you the whole picture. What happened was something like this:

• you have a language. Let’s call it “A”.
• that language has two children. Let’s call them “Hittite” and “B”.
• language “B” has a thousand children. And grandchildren, and grand-grandchildren. Among their descendants you see Latin, Sanskrit, Greek, Russian, English, and a lot more.

Now. Which language is Proto-Indo-European: “A” or “B”? …tricky question! People use the term to refer to both languages. Even if there’s a gap of 1~3 millenniums between them. Yay, scientific precision! /s

When they see the distinction, and want to specify which one, they call A “Early PIE” and B “Late PIE”. But the mess still affects reconstructions a fair bit; it’s like trying to reconstruct Ancient Greek and Modern Greek as if they were the same language, you know? (Or, dunno, English and Old English.)

I believe some really weird shit we see in modern reconstructions is caused by this. Such as the weird *e *o *e: *o: vowel system; length is likely a late PIE feature, while this two-qualities (or three) system is from early PIE.

Broken window fallacy + “fuck the others”.

Yes. And, more important than that: EV batteries don’t just take energy to run, they take energy to manufacture. Usually you wouldn’t count the energy taken to produce a gas tank because it’s long-lasting, but if your battery lasts ~10y this amount of energy might be quite relevant — and probably is relevant due to the price.

(This shows the “fuck cars” community is spot on, when it comes to EVs: they don’t solve the problem of the environmental impact behind cars, at most they alleviate it. An actual solution would be to design cities so people don’t need to use cars willy-nilly.)

Yeah, the site coding was awful. Kind of expected from AI junk. However it seems to me like the data itself was actually researched, not “vibed”.

Edit: I see OP tweaked their AI prompt and delivered a watt-hour rating for petrol, which they must have pulled out of their ass.

I redid the maths:

• petrol heat of combustion should be 45~50MJ/kg, based on the the typical values for alkanes.
• 1 MJ = 277 Wh
• specific density of gasoline: 0.715~0.780 kg/L
• fuel consumption seems to be 5~11 L/100km = 0.05~0.11 L / km
• 1.61 km = 1 mile

Plugging all this stuff together, you get (45~50 MJ/kg) * (0.715~0.780 kg/L) * (277 Wh/MJ) * (0.05~0.11 L/km) * (1.61 km / mile) = 717~1913 Wh/mile. The estimate in the site is 1000 Wh/mile; it sounds reasonable.

More than enough to falsify the hypothesis that those differences in behaviour are innate, and sex-based; otherwise they’d be more consistent across ethnic and racial groups.

It also shows that what’s expected from gender roles varies wildly. This is kind of common sense, but it’s good to have studies showing it.

idk im just kinda upset and at a fuckin loss. What kinda website perma bans a user for life and logs all their info just to make sure they don’t come back?!

The same sort of website that permabans all accounts from a user except the one he uses to moderate some small comm subreddit. Fuck Reddit and fuck everything Reddit.

And, like, I get you didn’t like the Fediverse. Yes, it could use a bit more activity. …but to be frank, it’s probably the best alternative to Reddit you’ll find. And sorry for my uncalled advice, but: if that isn’t enough then at least don’t go back to Reddit, that place is a shithole and it’ll make you feel like shit.

(I actually got a few specific questions answered here in the Fediverse. Orchid identification, spider identification, a bunch of Linux questions. In Reddit getting the actual info is always a chore, that place is too noisy for my tastes.)

I’m not sure but I think the suffix in this case would yield “fuckard”. With “fucktard” being interpreted as “fuck [re]tard”. And given “retard” is nowadays interpreted as a slur, I’d discourage it.

Cool! Does it have AI? Also I want it to connect to a phone app, do not bring me an actual program, or a website (I don’t understand what’s a “browser”, is it Google?), bring me an app! I’m fine with a subscription model, or if the cube starts leaking ooze onto the counter without it. It’s also fine if the cube is expected to leak ooze two years from now, because some server thingamajig is gone.

/s obviously.

Let’s roll for a moment with the worst hypothesis, and say that: his account of the facts is all bullshit, he has been submitting slop for a long time, and he only came up with his “I was sick” because this time he got caught on it.

In that hypothesis, Ars Technica has been covering his arse for a long time. Either due to excessive leniency (they caught him other times, and did nothing about it) or sheer incompetence (lack of some internal review process, either pre- or post-publication). Basically giving him the OK sign to keep doing it. Then the timing of firing him shows AT’s issue wasn’t Edwards submitting slop, but giving in to public outrage.

In either case the primary blame goes to Ars Technica, not to the individual worker. The only situation I can say they would be handling this right is if this was his second time doing this shit, in that time he was privately scolded and warned (“this shit is not tolerable, do it again and you’re out”), and still went for it. I find it unlikely.

And from our (both of us) PoV there’s absolutely no info to know if he did this shit more times. In that situation I don’t think we should assume he did.